8 Steps to build an amazing wedding portfolio for your website
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Why your images can make or break your wedding business website
If you provide a creative service to couples getting married (I’m talking to you florists, photographers, planners, cake artists, stationers, and all you other clever gworls!) - you often end up with a smorgasbord of work that you could potentially choose to showcase on your website, ranging in all colors, sizes, and even moods.
However, it’s usually not the best idea to feature photos from every wedding or event you’ve worked. If the message or style of your portfolio isn’t consistent across your website, it can really confuse your prospects about what exactly you’re great at and what they can expect from you.
Instead, it’s better to be selective and tell a strong story about your work! The photos you choose not only help clients understand your brand, but can help a couple envision the transformation you can provide them - i.e. how couples will FEEL once they work with you.
Aside from that, your photos can also 100% make or break your website design (womp womp). I mean, you can have a beautiful custom-designed website; but if your images are dated, low-resolution, or aesthetically all over the place - then your design can be effectively killed.
And we all know the more snatched your website looks, the more people tend to assume you’re a legitimate, trustworthy business.
So how the heck do you know which photos to use?! And once you pick them out, how can you arrange them in a way that enhances your website design instead of taking away from it?
We’ll take a look at each of these challenges in this post; but on top of that, there are some image technicalities that most business owners don’t even realize are affecting the speed and usability of their site. But I got you covered here!
We’re going to take it step-by-step and look at 8 ways to maximize the impact of your website photos. Let’s go!
Curating your portfolio with a deliberate purpose in mind
Step 1: Determine your specialty
Before you even TOUCH your portfolio, I want you to do some strategizing. Just like with any branding or marketing decision, you need to think about what you wanna be known for.
What type of events would you want to do more of? What kind of couple do you want to attract? Does it have anything to do with age group? Location? Income? Taste level? Aesthetic? Personality?
Here are some examples of specialties you could be known for:
Beach weddings, traditional southern weddings, unconventional & creative weddings, brightly colored events, LGBTQ+ weddings, fine art, drama or theatrical, etc.
Figure out what lights you up or what you know best! If you don’t become known for some sort of specialty, it’s very hard to compete with all the other vendors in your category.
Step 2: Convey certain emotions
One more step before you start culling - I want you to think a little deeper.
You’re not just selling the physical service or result you provide - you’re also selling an emotion, a transformation, or an experience.
Emotions play a HUGE part in our buying decisions, so you need to clearly demonstrate how your clients will get to feel from having worked with you.
Here are some examples of different moods that you can emulate through your photos:
Confidence, joy, sentimentality, beauty, fun, romance, attitude, boldness, originality, humor, etc.
Different types of couples will care about different things. Your next step is to figure out what that looks like for your ideal clients.
If you’re not sure how you make people feel when they work with you, you can look through your past client testimonials! Then look back at when you felt the most successful, and ask yourself what the common denominator is. What was it about that event or that couple that just felt perfect for you?
Step 3: Establish consistency
Once you know what you specialize in + the emotional experience you provide, start pulling out the images from your portfolio that best represent those things.
Now not every picture is gonna show a literal emotion, and not every picture is gonna be focused on a certain style or location. That’s okay; you can definitely use a mix of both!
Now you can take it one step further by looking for like colors among the photos you’ve pulled. Is there a theme emerging? Could you be selective and only use the photos that fit within a certain color range or editing style?
It’s not always an option to limit yourself to one color scheme but when you can, it really increases the impact your photos have and makes your brand look expensive!
Read: 3 Ways to declutter your website design
The overall goal here is to put out a consistent message about what you can provide for your clients and increase your perceived credibility.
Showcasing your wedding & event photos strategically
Step 4: Prioritize the home page
Your website’s home page is where you really want to create the best visual representation of your work, because it's likely going to be the first impression. You don't wanna hide away your best stuff where someone has to maybepossiblyhopefully click on a link in order to see it.
Use 5-10 consistent photos on your home page that really work together as a collection and make me impressed with your brand. Quality is definitely better than quantity here!
The most valuable image slot is the space on your home page just before scrolling down, a.k.a. your header, hero, or banner image.
Whether you present a single photo, a collage, or a slideshow at the top of the page; try to make sure it encapsulates the specialty & the emotion you chose. This will really attract & repel the right couples from the get-go.
Step 5: Create visual balance
To keep your design clean, pay attention to which photos are going next to each other as you’re organizing them throughout your website. When the composition of images are too similar, the design starts to look busy.
It's just like when you're crafting the perfect Instagram feed or a beautifully laid out photo album. You want to strike the right balance between tight shots and wide shots; between people, objects, and spaces.
Using variation and visual breathing room between the heavily-detailed pictures will make your work look more high-end and pleasing to the eye.
Optimizing your images to get better results
Step 6: Make your file sizes smaller
Now that you know which pictures you want to use and how you want to lay them out on your site, there are a few best practices that can improve the technical performance of your website.
Do NOT use massive portfolio images on your website! Oftentimes when you get a final wedding photo, the file size is 5-10 times larger than it needs to be for web purposes.
Large image files are one of the biggest culprits of a slow website. Users (and Google) hate slow websites.
So to speed up your site, aim for each image to be under 500 kb (or as close as you can get it).
You can compress (resize) your image files in Lightroom, Photoshop, Blogstomp, or JPEGmini.
Step 7: Rename your files with keywords
Once you have your image files down to the appropriate size, there’s one more step you can take before adding them to the actual site. Google can actually read your image names, and you can use this to your advantage for Search Engine Optimization.
For example, if you have a file named “DaniMark_1416” change it to a brief description of what’s in the photo, like “Seattle forest wedding ceremony”. That way, if a bride-to-be were searching for inspiration on Google, your photo might pop up in the search results.
If you really wanna go the extra mile, find out how to add alt text to your images after uploading them to your website platform. This just acts as even more keywords for Google to pick up on!
Step 8: Fine-tune your mobile site
Finally, after you’ve finalized all your website images, don’t forget about the mobile version of your site. Over half of internet users at any given time are operating on their mobile device, so making sure your website functions just as well on a phone as it does on the desktop is crucial.
ANY time you make design or layout changes, be sure to check how those changes appear on your phone. Make sure your photos aren’t being cropped weird, you can still see the person’s face, any text over images is still completely legible, etc.
Btw, here’s an easy Mobile-Friendly Test that Google created that rates your website’s mobile optimization score and even tells you what to fix. Pretty nifty right?!
That’s eight whole ways to make more impact when you’re showing off your wedding service on your website :) I recommend Pinning this blog post for later and referencing it any time you’re ready to update your portfolio!
And if you’re crazy busy (you know, running a wedding business an’ all), or if you’re just feeling stuck - I’m happy to step in and get you over that hump. I offer a Website Intensive, where you hire me for a day (or half-day) to lend my expertise and knock things off your website to-do list. You can find out more and book an Intensive here!
